Where I write about running, marathons, Home Ownership, DIY projects, marriage, raising twins, growing up Polish and other Mysteries of Life

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

No Second guessing these Life Decisions

It seems like I always second guess my decisions or have trouble making a decision in the first place. Sometimes I cannot even decide what I want to have for lunch. However, there are three decisions I've made over the course of my life that I am at perfect peace.

I refer to these as the Three Best Decisions of My Life. Sure, I’ve made many decisions that have arguably worked out better, such as marrying Nightingale. The reason I single these three out is they are decisions that I've never seconded guessed or looked back on and regretted, other than perhaps wishing I had done them sooner.

Going to G-School: When I finished undergrad, I swore I would never go back to higher education. However, after not breaking into a journalism and suffering years as a litigation paralegal for an evil corporate law firm, I decided that being able to eat and pay rent the same month was the life for me.

Becoming Catholic: My family is catholic but they didn’t send me to parochial school, probably more out of cost than true heathenism. As I got older I got more spiritual and ironically, I was reading a lot of Anne Rice at the time and her descriptions of the Catholic rituals got me curious. I started going to church and a few months later I had my epiphany.

It was Labor Day weekend 1999, and my roommate and long time friend from high school friend had just moved out. Talk about a souvenir of a terrible year: I had lost my job, broke my toes, and been mugged within a three week period. It was a very dark time in my life. I felt like a weight was about to crush me. Then I took a deep breath and felt like everything would be alright. And I know that wasn't my own steam, God had shown some mercy on me.

Getting Lasik Eye Surgery: It was never a question of if but when. I’m glad I did it because not fumbling with contact lens or waking up to blurry vision is tremendous. Lasik — short for laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis, which entails cutting and reshaping the cornea.

Were there risks? Sig Other 1.0 was an ophthalmologist and she told me that in the early years there were so many people who got Lasik that later research would have declared them bad candidates that the industry as a whole voluntarily tightened the definition for what a good candidate was so as to prevent lawsuits unsuccessful surgeries.

Looking back, I don’t think going to G-School any sooner would have been an option from a financial standpoint. Same goes for Lasik. Sure. I joke that I used the money for Polish Girlfriend 1.0 ring to pay for my surgery. The truth is I had FSA money set aside and it came down to use it or lose it. And it took hitting rock bottom and having an epiphany to get me to become catholic. And in the baker's dozen years that I've been, I've certainly not lived up to all the requirements and have certainly challenged the doctrine.

I do sometimes wonder if I should have chosen some different course work at DePaul. IIRC the program options for CTI were not very flexible even though they were toted as such at the time. That's the way of marketing, even in academia. They made it sound like you could switch from Databases to Networks concentrations when in reality most of the concentrations shared very few common courses.